Cherry makes a room cheerful.
Walnut is dull and dismal.

The Forests of the World.--The rapid exhaustion of the forests of the
world, and more particularly of the once great reserves of timber in
the United States and Canada, renders it inevitable that, in a very
few years indeed, iron must supersede wood for a variety of uses. The
drain upon the world's resources in timber is prodigious. Every year
92,000,000 railway sleepers are used in America alone, while to supply
firewood for the whole of the States, fourteen times the quantity of
wood consumed by the railways is annually required. At the computation
of the most recent statistics there were 441,000,000 of acres of
woodland in the United States; but since over 50,000,000 of acres are
cut down yearly, this great area of timber will be non-existent in
less than twenty years, unless replanting upon a very extensive
scale be at once undertaken. Already efforts are being made in this
direction, and not long since some 4,000,000 of saplings were planted
in a single day in Kansas and the neighboring States. But since the
daily consumption is even greater than this, it is obvious that the
work of replanting must be undertaken systematically if it is to keep
pace, even approximately, with the destruction. In France and Germany,
where the forests are national property, forestry has been elevated
to the status of an exact science; but the timber lands of those
countries are small indeed compared with those in the United States.

A Church Built from a Single Tree.--A redwood tree furnished all the
timber for the Baptist church in Santa Rosa, one of the largest church
edifices in the country. The interior of the building is finished in
wood, there being no plastered walls. Sixty thousand shingles were
made from the tree after enough was taken for the church. Another
redwood tree, cut near Murphy's Mill, about ten years ago, furnished
shingles that required the constant labor of two industrious men for
two years before the tree was used up.

Trees That Sink.--Of the more than four hundred species of trees
found in the United States there are said to be sixteen species whose
perfectly dry wood will sink in water. The heaviest of these is the
black ironwood of southern Florida, which is more than thirty per
cent. heavier than water. Of the others, the best known are the lignum
vitae and mangrove; another is a small oak found in the mountains
of western Texas, southern New Mex